Twenty years ago today, a small probe coasting through deep space somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto received instructions from home to turn around and snap a photograph of the distant world that had sent it out into the universe. The picture Voyager 1 sent back shows our very own Earth as seen from across that humbling 3.7 billion mile gulf. If you look very closely, you can see it -- a pale, blue dot hanging in the first ray from the right. Sagan had lobbied for Voyager to take this picture, and though some of his colleagues were reluctant to chance the probe's sensitive equipment on such an unscientific task, the picture speaks for itself. The tension between our heartbreaking fragility and the reach of our ambitions has never been so potently illustrated.
"Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
- Carl Sagan
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